So Jesus and Jeffrey Rowland are having a conversation in a bar…
Now, see, that’s the root of the problem: religion is crazy when you think about it, and when people do start considering its inconsistencies and ridiculous claims, its proponents either try to spin you around with increasingly nutty rationalizations, or they outright tell you to stop thinking. If science has any heresy at all, that’s it: to stop thinking is the one thing we must not do.
This is why religion is a science stopper. It makes absurd claims about the history and origin and nature of the world, and then tells you that you can’t address the questions it raises with reason and evidence.
Reminds me of the excellent Jesus and Mo cartoon series.
Oops, this was the first episode.
I’m just warning you: Thinking about it too much will deprive you of the joy of worshiping Knothole Jesus in Lodi.
The tack I take on this is that when someone else starts talking religion I just immediately disagree with them in a polite fashion. I’ve been doing this for thirty odd years and people get used to the fact that not everyone agrees with them. Furthermore the also drop the entire business of their religious beliefs being more sacrosanct than the beliefs of rationalists. In fact, they tend to keep their mouths closed and stop from questioning science after they’ve been shown to be ignorant, over and over. I don’t usually bring up the topic of Christianity because frankly I’m not interested.
A common skill the non-fundamentalist believers acquire is the ability to shift chameleon (or if you prefer, squid)-like from Christian mode to deist mode and back again as the situation requires.
Once you realise this, it’s quite amusing to observe; their rationalizations just consist of temporarily changing religions as necessary.
Why is religion a science stopper? What about the versions of religion that don’t make testable claims about the history of the world or that don’t proscribe perfectly rational thinking in other ways? Why do these prevent science?
For a simple example, Odin used the processes we have come to understand via science (evolution, plate tectonics, gravity, etc.) as his tools to create the universe and Odin wants us to be nice to each other.
How does this belief in Odin prevent science? I don’t follow you.
BCH
wait! that CAN’T be Jesus in that comic! Where’s his dark blonde hair and the piercing blue eyes?
I like that Jesus is drinking a Diet Coke. That’s hip, man.
Burt Humburg wrote:
Have you met Odin personally? Or did you just met one of Odin’s priests? Who pays the priest’s salary, you and other followers or Odin? What kind of god can’t pay his own priests?
It doesn’t have to be. For much of the last 400 years Xianity hasn’t been. The Catholic church made a mistake with Giordana Bruno, burnt at the stake, and Galileo almost burnt at the stake. After that they leave science pretty much alone.
The USA is probably the most religious country in first world. It is also the world leader in science and about 50% of total world R&D expenditures are in this country. That’s the data, the facts.
The attack on science is from a few cults in the south central USA who think it is more important to shore up their bronze age mythology with lies than to teach and do good science. A loser position if there ever was one.
The best they can hope for is to drive science underground. And then head on back to the dark ages. Who in the hell wants to live in the dark ages, really. Be careful what you ask for. You might just get it.
It is not as if they haven’t been warned to but out of science;
Usually, even a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and the other elements of this world, about the motion and orbit of the stars and even their size and relative positions, about the predictable eclipses of the sun and moon, the cycles of the years and the seasons, about the kinds of animals, shrubs, stones, and so forth, and this knowledge he holds to as being certain from reason and experience. Now, this is a disgraceful and dangerous things for an infidel to hear a Christian, presumable giving the meaning of Holy Scripture, talking nonsense on these subjects; and we should take all means to prevent such an embarrassing situation, in which people show up vast ignorance in a Christian and laugh it to scorn. The shame is not so much that an ignorant individual is derided, but that people outside the household of faith think our sacred writers held such opinions, and, to the great loss of those for whose salvation we toil, the writers of the Scripture are criticized and rejected as unlearned men. If they find a Christian mistaken in a field which they themselves know well and hear him maintaining his foolish opinions about our books, how are they going to believe those books in matters concerning the resurrection of the dead, the hope of eternal life, and the kingdom of heaven, when they think their pages are full of falsehoods on facts which they themselves have learnt from experience and the light of reason? Reckless and incompetent expounders of Holy Scripture bring untold trouble and sorrow on their wiser brethren when they are caught in one of their mischievous false opinions and are taken to task by those who are not bound by the authority of our sacred books. For then, to defend their utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements, they will try to call upon Holy Scripture for proof and even recite from memory many passages which they think support their position, although they understand neither what they say nor the things about which they make assertion. (De Genesi ad litteram, Book I, Chapter 19)
Untrue. They still tell lies about condoms and HIV, for example. It seems to be very difficult for religious people to be honest when all manner of things in their religion lead them to be dishonest (with themselves and others). That dishonesty is not conducive to doing good science – quite apart from the “shut-up and don’t think about it” component to religions.
Note that Thomas Aquinas was also being dishonest, eg in his motives. It wasn’t that he wanted the truth about things to be discovered, known and told at all. He just didn’t want Christians to be so easily caught out as liars and fools.
Of course when you think that everything is the result of a mindless process…existence, life, mind and reason itself (which is of course claimed by “scientists” like Dawkins but not demonstrated)…well, that is kind of crazy too.
Frankly, fundamentalists of any stripe…theist, atheists, whatever…stink just as bad.
Yeah, their stance on condoms, HIV, and birth control is a disgrace and dangerous to the whole overpopulated, creaking life support, world. It also has virtually no biblical authority, something they just added on later.
OTOH, who pays them that much attention on personal issues like family planning? The average size of a Catholic family in the US is almost identical to that of the population as a whole, roughly 2 kids/family.
My impression FWIW, is that the average Catholic at least in the US, listens to the priests and the Pope, lifelong celibates and unmarrieds, rattle on about birth control, smile and nod, and then just totally ignore it. None of their business anyway, how many children people have and why, like it or not.
Don’t be so parochial. They do most of their damage in Africa on that one. The religous people aren’t less evil and less dishonest just because not everyone everywhere falls for every one of their lies the same way.
“They still tell lies about condoms and HIV”
Why not be more precise in your comments. I had no idea what you were talking about because I don’t use them as an information source. Apparently you were referring to the “Vatican factoid” that condoms are permeable to the AIDS virus.
Norman Doering @9 sayeth
Oddly enough, this is precisely the reason why our lot jumped ship from Tyr and Odin and the crew to Xtianity. That, and the threat of “shock and awe” from the Franks etc.
As is often remarked, the English are not a spiritual people.
Speaking of Odin, “…help us fight the army of Satan…” sounds like a bit of Valhalla/Ragnarok grafted on to Christian eschatology. Unless that vision of Ragnarok was actually influenced by contact with Christianity. In which case, the souls of departed Christians really are being conscripted into a ghostly legion for an inevitable battle with the damned. And that’s why you should always trim your finger- and toenails, kids.
Raven:
I was interviewing for a job at the Superconducting Supercollider when the fundamentalists under Newt Gingrich killed it. Now, politically, I know Newt was aiming chiefly at the fact that it was Jim Wright’s heavy lifting that got it into Texas, and Newt was aiming for payback. But I also counted the votes, and the religious trend was unmistakable.
Yeah, the Democrats narrowly control Congress again. But the Supercollider is no Lazarus, and there’s no Science Jesus to pull it back from the dead if it were. (There’s gotta be a good joke in there somewhere about NOT driving science underground, but I’ve only had two cups of coffee today.)
And here in Texas we have Don McLeroy, creationist supreme, as the director of the effort to “improve” biology textbooks.
Here in Texas the Dark Ages are as close as Irving Independent School District, where they have “medical volunteers” telling kids that condoms leak viruses and shouldn’t be used.
Maybe the spiders are massing at Lake Tawakoni as a sign of something. We can hope. Do spiders communicate with squid?
What? To be eaten first?
What? To be eaten first?
Why do you think a mind is required for producing “existence, life, mind and reason itself”? I’m not aware of any evidence for that idea.
Why do you think a mind is required for producing “existence, life, mind and reason itself”? I’m not aware of any evidence for that idea.
Thus neatly providing one case in which the moderates undeniably enable the extremists.
For most of those practicing a religion, it isn’t about explanations of where we come from, it’s about how to live while we are here. The bible study groups I’ve attended usually talk about practical application and how to grow as an individual, which in their view was compassion tempered with integrity in one’s dealings with family, friends, co-workers and the community. The real science-stopper for them, as I see it, is a sense that only applied science has value. If it can’t be obviously applied to improving peoples’ lives, in their view, it’s a waste of resources.
I think the same people tend to look at theories as something to either apply to their lives or reject, and this is part of the confusion about evolution. They think evolution must have sweeping consequences for their interpersonal growth, just like the biblical passages they look to. The only “practical application” they see possible is each-man-for-himself and further that existence is chance and accident, finally concluding in nihilism and chaos. These are gross misinterpretations of evolutionary theory, and I think they result from confusing descriptive precepts with prescriptive ones.
For many religious people, everything boils down to “shoulds”. They gravitate to intelligent design, often attracted by the name and not knowing what it really involves, because it sounds so useful. It seems to promise a way of adopting the findings of science (their flawed, ID version of it) as a kind of roadmap of how to live. Everything for them, is about application to their lives, appropriate or not. (Same trend in their rejection of “secular” entertainment, because it’s a bad roadmap for life, not realizing it isn’t intended to teach.)
It’s important I think to look at continuities in resistance to science. Before creationists or IDers became popular, science had its critics. Often the captains of industry were the loudest, for while they adopted technology that was useful, they often viewed scientists as engaged in a form of extended play, largely unproductive. The contest between pure and applied science continues today in academic settings. I think it underlies at least part of the debate over evolution. Seeing where people are coming from (dare I say it?!) would help scientists dispel some of their mistaken objections.
Evolution is a scientific fact. Darwinian evolution is the best theory to explain it. As such it is neutral on religion and philosophy. If humans never existed or ceased to exist, life would just keep on changing and evolving. Just like the earth would keep rotating and the sun burning hydrogen.
If religious people don’t understand it or ignore it, who cares. If they believe the earth is 6,000 years old and the old Jews kept dinosaurs as pets, who cares. If they think god is coming back any day now and murdering everyone (again) who cares. What we object to is them trying to sneak their weird beliefs and bronze age mythology into our childrens science classes. That we care about and rightly so.
There are dozens of creation myths and all were fervently believed at one time. They are all equally valid even if few believe in Odin and Valhalla or Zeus or Coyote anymore. They belong in the churches and science belongs in science classes.
[channeling Jesus]Actually, I got tortured to death because I was a damn fool who took the prophets too damn personally, and pissed off Chaiphas and his faction in the Sanhedrin. His butt monkey, Pontius Pilate helped.
BTW, I hate Diet Coke. I want my transmission fluid sweetened by some form of ‘ose, even fructose.[/channeling Jesus]
Sucralose?
Dan writes:
Just a minute! Jesus is omnipotent, but he needs diet drinks to keep the weight off?
Exxon, et. al., emit untruths about global warming. The Bush Admin emits untruths about the war in Iraq. Standard & Poors, Moodys etc. issued AAA ratings to securities backed by subprime mortgages.
Three examples will do – the point being that if going against reality is such a common non-religious human trait, then maybe it is not the religion but this common human failing that causes the Church too to deny reality.
If being member of a religious group enabled one to transcend this human failing, then would you endorse religion? I think not.
Arun: Agreed that humans often lie about reality, sometimes after convincing themselves that they are telling the truth. That is why I hate ideology (theories which are permitted to over-rule facts), of which most religion is a subset. But since most religion can be shown to have traits that encourage rejection of reality, less religion would tend to produce less rejection of reality (but certainly not none!). If we want a more rational society, we should fight against things which make people act less rationally, and a list of such things must include organized religion.
Burt Humburg: Well, you’ve claimed (in your example, of course) that something created the universe. That is likely wrong – and even if it isn’t, the idea that it is put forward without warrant is the bigger concern.
Woah, thanks for the link! I can’t believe how few typos there are in this comment thread, it is barely even classifiable as the internet.
We all use our time machines to go back and fix them.